The
very first principle of the Principles of Accreditation for SACS accreditation,
quoted above, says institutions need to act with integrity, it even specifically says that not acting with
integrity is grounds for loss of accreditation. SACS, incidentally, is the
accreditor for UNC, you know, the university that ran an 18 year scandal of
bogus courses, firing whistleblowers, squelching investigations, falsifying
documents, and lying extensively about the extent of the fraud.

Excuses have been made for UNC—they really
only intended academic fraud just for the athletes, and things just got out of
hand. Whatever. The important thing for the gentle reader to understand is UNC
is not special, not in terms of academic fraud, and not in terms of lack of
integrity.

Another obscure article highlights how
ridiculous things are in terms of integrity:

Adults reading this post would, and
should, find that hard to believe. First, a quote explaining just how bad it
is:

"About half of all first-year students in the US seriously
underestimate how much student debt they have," according to the report.

Additionally, the report found that 28% of students with federal loans
reported having no federal debt. Another 14% with federal loans said they had
no student debt at all….”

Really, over a quarter of students with
federal loans don’t even realize it. Now, an adult should find this surprising,
because an adult probably figured that student loan debt is like every other
debt: you have to sign some forms, you have to go through a (sometimes
extensive) credit check, you have to know how much you’re taking, and only
after all that do you get handed a check.

Student loan debt is nothing like that,
however. The checks come much later than when the student signs up for classes,
and payments come much, much, later, years
after the loan is taken out. When the crime is committed of putting a
student into debt without telling him, it can easily be 5 years before the
student knows about it, when he’s asked for the first payment. By then,
administrators will be long gone with the loot, I promise.

The far more critical difference is the
“sign some forms” part. See, a student, to qualify for debt, all he has to do
is check a box saying “I am a degree seeking student.” And…that’s it. No credit
check, and then the money flows, mostly to college administrators, but a
trickle usually makes it to the student (although even public schools are
looking to slurp up that last trickle).

Oh, there’s one more thing for this loan
to be accepted: the school must be accredited. Having brought a school through
the accreditation process, it’s not all that hard to get considering the money
involved…and UNC shows it’s pretty tough to lose.

Poor
kids. They have no idea how real loans are supposed to work, so they get
suckered into this system. They only find out years later that they’ve saddled
themselves with a lifetime of debt, one that cannot be removed via bankruptcy
(heck, some student loans don’t even end in death, but “luckily” Federal loans
generally do). The students can’t even get rid of the debt if their education
is totally bogus, as, again, was demonstrated at UNC.

An adult reader would be shocked at just
how easy it is to qualify for studentloan checks, and having learned from hard experience, “there’s always a
catch”, would immediately become suspicious at being handed so much money, but
realize, your typical college student is fresh out of high school: not a child,
but certainly not wise in the ways of the world. His parents, alas, figure the
“accredited” school will take care of their child, little realizing the caliber
of people running higher education today (and, these are the same people
running accreditation).

The
kid just figures college works like public school: he shows up, and everything
else is taken care of. Higher education takes care of those kids all right…in
much the same way a stockyard takes care of cattle.

But wait a minute here, as part of accreditation,
schools promise to act with integrity. Taking advantage of people, kids or
adults, in this manner is as far away from integrity as possible.

Because these kids figure higher education
is just like public education, many students really don’t have a clue what kind
of expenses they are incurring at college:

“…Using
nationally representative data, we find that about half of all first-year
students in the U.S. seriously underestimate how much student debt they have,…”

Administrators justify their vicious exploitation of children by saying
“in the eyes of the law, they’re adults”, but even this is dodgy. As I’ve shown
many times, much of college is sub-high school level, and a substantial
percentage of college coursework is 6th grade or lower. In order
for a student to get into a 6th grade level “college” course, he
takes a placement test provided by the institution, documenting that he has the
intellectual capacity of an 10 year old, or younger.

So, it doesn’t matter if the kid’s chronological age places him as an
adult, the institution has provided its
own documentation that the kid is not mentally competent to function as an
adult…and certainly not competent to understand the monumental risk he’s taking
on with college loans. Admin signs him up anyway, laughing all the way to bank
as it does so.

What is being done to our college students is completely indefensible,
and it’s very clear that a great many students are coming on campus and being
outright deceived and exploited into taking student loans. If accreditation
were legitimate about integrity (or much else, really), schools that did this
to their students would instantly lose accreditation, much like accreditors say
in writing. That’s really what should
be done.